People Don't Change.
( or if/when they do, they change very very very very little )
Their true character doesn't change. That is formed as a child growing up.
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People Don't Change.
( or if/when they do, they change very very very very little )
Their true character doesn't change. That is formed as a child growing up.
Of course people change. Are you the same person you were 10 or 20 years ago? I know I'm not.
But doesn't look like it matters any more, so who gives a shit.
I honestly don't even know if that was him, but assuming it was. I put out the word, and assuming he looked me up. Nobody else in this country would be have that much hatred towards me. And honestly, that hatred is warranted. Decent chance he went to hell and back after I broke up with him, so can't blame him.
I am the same person I was 30 years ago. I've learned a lot since then. I'm wiser. But most definitely, at my core, I am the same good person with the same good values I was 30 years ago.
And so are you.
Yes, the core inherint values stay the same, but as you said, we become wiser as we age.
I don't have a problem with his core values. That's the whole reason I fell in love with him. He has a lot of pent up anger in him, and grew up at an early age, same as me. Since he was about 10 or 11 I think, he was the man of the house. I don't know exactly when his parents split up, but he grew up young.
Again, none of this matters any more anyway. I searched, I found, I basically got told to go fuck myself. End of story.
I'm surprised (and I'm not alone) why the Bitcoin posts haven't found their own thread, courtesy of an effective Moderator
As I remarked, many posts agoMoney is generally accepted to be a store of value, a medium of exchange and the unit of account. Most of the posts here have had Matt asserted that as a medium of exchange Bitcoin is THE future (and Bruce agrees); not only that, Matt believes so much that it is a store of value that he is hording Bitcoins. Meanwhile bucknaway believes that it's such a miniscule unit of account that he has a few jingling in his pockets as he saunters down the street, no doubt sporting The Look.Quote:
Bitcoin is merely one of the emerging ways of transacting which rely on Blockchain which will revolutionise aspects of banking. However its value to the ordinary punter (ie. those of us who don't deal drugs or kiddy porn) is probably limited for the time being
However Bitcoin was merely the first embodiment of the Blockchain technology - and first-movers don't always last, especially in technology. Remember Sony and betamax? Machine code, Fortran and Cobol?
The latest edition of Wired magazine has a long article sayingI'd be pinning my hopes (and fortune) and something backed by those companies and Linux Foundation rather than on a first-mover whose founder wants desperately to retain his anonymity.Quote:
Several major companies from across both the technology and financial industriesтАФincluding IBM, Intel, and Cisco as well as the London Stock Exchange Group and big-name banks JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and State StreetтАФhave joined forces to create an alternative to the blockchain, the global online ledger that underpins the bitcoin digital currency.
Overseen by the not-for-profit Linux Foundation, this open source project aims to build blockchain-like technology that can bring a new level of automation and transparency to a wide range of services in the business world, including stock exchanges and other financial markets.
Blockchain is to Bitcoin..... as the internal combustion engine is to the automobile.
Anyone, including you or I........ or the US military and God combined...... can make a new blockchain.
But Bitcoin is POWERED BY the bitcoin blockchain.
The bitcoin network is now more powerful than the top 30 supercomputers in the entire world..... *combined*.
Good luck "competing" with that.
This announcement by JP Morgan and company... sounds like a press release from the National Typewriter Manufacturers Association saying, "We're about to develop a brand new model of typewriter that will compete with the word processor."
Oh.... and in the past 3 months, my net worth doubled again. So... there's that.
They're a day late and a dollar short. They've gotten caught with their pants down. And they're terrified of being considered obsolete overnight.... literally.
So far, over $1 Billion has been invested in Bitcoin Blockchain infrastructure and supporting technologies. Super smart people clearly see that bitcoin is the future..... and they've been investing millions and millions of dollars in venture capital into building the entire ecosystem supporting bitcoin. See http://cointelegraph.com/news/115595/1- ... astructure
Oh. And in the past 3 months.... my net worth doubled again. So.... there's that. :-B
( not only mine, of course, but everyone in the world that's invested in bitcoin )
What other investment has gone up 206819% in only 5 years? ( 2,068 times its original value )
Any? In the history of mankind?
Wouldn't hold your breath. The entire point of bitcoin is to remove banks and the government from the equation, so JP Morgan starting up their own crypto-currency probably wouldn't be received too well. That, and there's simply too much infrastructure and companies built around bitcoin now for it to fail, or for anyone to compete with it.Quote:
Originally Posted by kommentariat
Media and companies alike love to talk about "blockchain technology", but that doesn't even make sense. It's just a P2P network (remember Napster?) that passes a bunch of messages around using 3 different encryption algorithms. However, people have decided those messages are worth a fair bit of money. Plus people love to talk about all the "possibilities" of the blockchain, but no, it's purely a financial network. You can now store 40 bytes of additional information with each transaction, but that's as far as it goes, and there's zero chance that limit will be getting changed any time soon -- the blockchain is already large enough and keeping it as small as possible is a huge debate at the moment.
You can start your own crypto-currency any time you'd like though. There's thousands of them, and I think it only costs about $30 to get a developer to make you your own blockchain for you. Have fun getting any traction though. Competing with bitcoin would be the equivalent of a new search engine competing with Google. Many have tried, and they all failed.
I agree with your major sentiments. However, as the saying goes, God is in the details. And most of your details are incorrect. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by cdnmatt
The first paragraph is very correct.
The second paragraph is so untrue.... factually incorrect.... I don't know where to begin.
Omg. :-s Blockchain technology is the biggest breakthrough technology since the invention of the electronic *computer*.... yeah, the first computer in the world...... and the invention of the *internet* itself.....
There is a reason why all the media talk about it so much. The reason is because they are interviewing experts. And that's all the experts are raving about. Why? Because they are experts.
Blockchain technology does NOT even use any encryptionat all. Lord...... Where to start.
Blockchain technology uses recursive cryptographically signed transactions.... *signed* *cryptographically* and done *recursively*..... in a *chain* of *blocks* of transactions. Thus, the name, Block Chain. It uses Zero encryption. The chain is spread far and wide on an uncensorable p2p network ( similar to bittorrent; still going on stronger than ever before; still unstoppable by any government in the world ), tho it uses its own network, obviously.
The breakthrough in the history of the world is that we now have an *absolutely* *irrefutable* record, or log, or ledger. The most powerful organizations in the world --- in a combined effort --- cannot alter it. This tech, *obviously*, is already being used to record everything from land and real estate ownership.... to votes in elections.... to ownership of shares of stocks and other assets... to actual detailed *smart* contracts which are *self-enforcing* !! This is not a prediction. There are now thousands of companies already doing this. Many of the founders are among my friends. Google the word, ethereum for just one example of the world changing while you were napping. See https://www.ethereum.org
That "40 bytes of additional information with each transaction" you mentioned is completely irrelevant. First, the amount of data that can be attached to any transaction is unlimited. We now simply store any data in a separate p2p network and store only the hash of that data in the actual bitcoin transaction itself. Thus, someone can store 1 million terabytes of additional data within one bitcoin transaction if they want to.
Also, the recent debate about how to increase the block size has nothing to do with storing more data per transaction. It's about storing more transactions per block. This is absolutely essential and absolutely everyone agrees that it *will* happen.... because usage of bitcoin is growing so much so quickly. There is zero debate that this *will* happen. The only debate is about the exact method of implementing the block size increase. This block size increase *will* happen within the next 12 months, guaranteed.
This increase in the size of each individual block..... also has absolutely *nothing* to do with the overall size of the entire blockchain. The overall size of the entire blockchain is irrelevant at this point. We now use abbreviated indexes.... you can think of them as periodic "ledger summary" records. This way, the entire blockchain doesn't need to be loaded or read by apps. It only needs to be read, and summarized, by a server. But there's still never any fear of mistakes... because the "miners" ( the computers which process transactions ) *always* use the entire blockchain. Thus, transactions cannot happen unless they are valid. So, nobody is concerned about the overall size of the blockchain in full.... and they never will be. As it increases in size, storage capacity increases faster. And it's still a quite tiny file size... considering what it does.
Your last paragraph is generally correct. Except that if you pay a clone-bot to create your own altcoin for $75, it won't work. And it won't be a secure network. ( I can explain all the reasons why, if you care to know. ) To create an alternate blockchain crypto-currency, you'd need to pay an expert at least $2000. Alternatively, you could create a colored coin altcoin ( which piggybacks on top of the normal bitcoin blockchain ) for free or for a tiny tiny expense. ( Happy to teach people how to do that as well, if people are interested. )
Bitcoin's Future Shape: between $13,000 and $120k per bitcoin - BTCUSD TradingView
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/BTCUS ... -and-120k/
Price Today: http://preev.com
Do you remember what the price was yesterday? :p
Bitcoin is hardly the first P2P network ever invented, so it's not new technology. It just got repurposed for financial transactions. All it is is just a bunch of small messages being passed around, and getting stored on everyone's computer / server that's running a full node.
Yes, it does use encryption, specifically SHA512, RIPEMD160, and ECC secp256k1 curve. All three of those algorithims needs to be broken in order to "break bitcoin", which isn't going to happen any time soon. It also uses BASE58 encoding, but that's not encryption. If you'd like, you can learn all about the protocol here -- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification
No, the data is not unlimited. Aside from the actual transaction details itself (inputs, outputs, etc.) the limit for additional data is 40 bytes per-transaction by using OP_RETURN. You can not add more arbitrary data than that, as miners won't confirm the transaction if you do. Those data storage sites add a small hash to the transaction keeping it within the 40 byte limit, then add additional data in-house on their own system(s) associated with that hash.
Ethereum has not realistic use. Loads of people love to talk about "smart contracts", but there is no actual realistic use case for them from what I can tell. Besides, it's been years and they still haven't even done anything much with it. I don't understand what you'd use it for. So when you're signing a business contract, you have to hire both a lawyer and Python developer now? Your average Joe can't use Ethereum.
Yes, the size of the blockchain very much matters. It's already at the point now where Bitcoin Core is only really for merchants who have a dedicated server, as installing Bitcoin Core on your average desktop / laptop is quite the resource hog and takes about 2 or 3 days to download the entire blockchain. That's why it's such a heated debate. If the blockchain gets too bloated, full nodes will continue to drop off the network (already happening), and only people with a good amount of resources will be capable of running full nodes, opening the door to the possibility of centralization sometime in the future. Granted, there's SPV nodes and a chance of the lightening network coming in the future, but full nodes are required to keep the bitcoin network running.
Yes, it's very cheap to get your own alt-coin and blockchain. Just view the Services section of bitcointalk.org and there's always people offering alt-coin creation services for small amounts like 0.01 BTC. All you do is download a copy of the Bitcoin Core source code from Github, change a few variables like the port# and address prefixes, and voila, you have your own coin.